Wednesday, June 11, 2008

With all due respect, I am starting to wonder if in all that time McCain was forced to sit out in the hot Hanoi Hilton sun some real damage was done to some of his logic circuits. His response to Matt Lauer of CBS’ Today show is, quite frankly, crazed. There are more cracks in his logic than in my ex-wife’s Shirley Temple doll.

LAUER: If [The Surge] is working, Senator, do you now have a better estimateof when American Forces can come home from Iraq?

McCAIN: No but that’s not too important. What’s important is the casualties in Iraq. Americans are in South Korea, Americans are in Japan, American troops are in Germany. That’s all fine. American casualties and the ability to withdraw.

That’s so wrong on several levels. Here are two.

American families are suffering from husbands and wives experiencing multiple tours in Iraq. It is important. Maybe not to McCain, or Cheney, or Blackwater, but this is an important issue.

This next issue is a no-brainer to so many Americans I cannot understand how McCain and his believers don’t understand this very clear fact. Violence occurs in Iraq for two reasons: Sunni and Shi’a followers have been having at each other for hundreds of years and the only difference with this latest war is the readily available supply of explosives. Yes, by maintaining troops in Iraq we keep the sectarian violence at bay, or almost anyway. But this triggers the second reason for violence in Iraq: the very presence of American (read Infidel) troops. Iraqis, and nearly all Islamic people I am aware of, have a repugnance for Infidels. It’s in their religion and culture. The troops’ very presence in Iraq is a reason for these people to fight.

So the endgame that McCain envisions, an orderly pull-out, but a continued maintained presence in-country, after cessation of all violence, is a fairy tale. It will never happen.

How long will we be in Iraq? Bush said 50 years. McCain said “maybe 100”. Sorry guys, both of you are wrong. With the misjudgments that you have between you holding sway in our military policy in Iraq, it will be more like 1000 years.